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Monday, August 13, 2012

One of the students at my school has just bought his own computer. He wanted a little bit of advice as to how to get it going. The computer was old and incompatible with even the most basic keyboard we had. What impressed me was the effort that Callum has put into finding out about what he need to do to get this going. I offered to give him a slightly newer computer in return for a couple of articles and received the following first installment by the end of the day.My favorite quotes areI acquired a desktop computer tower for $1 at a garage sale in Tauranga it looked in perfect condition.It was a pretty bad pc i discoveredI ask my friends in the ICT lab for help, they point out how useless it is (because before i didn’t realise), but I’m still going to use it.

There are couple of discoveries here.

Students will persist when they are motivated by possible achievement.

Students are learning independently of us in areas that we can either choose or choose not to support and encourage.

Give students a chance to work and control real technologies let them show where they are at.

On Saturday 28th July I acquired a desktop computer tower for
$1 at a garage sale in Tauranga it looked in perfect condition. Everyone asked
me if I was going to take it home and open it up, I said I don't know. The next
day I wired it up with the cables, power check, VGA check, sound check, usb for
keyboard and mouse... there was none! So I opened it and saw a pretty empty
case, but everything was perfect except no hidden usbs. I re-arranged all the
ports so I could fit in an usb pci card and plug it into the motherboard. However when I turned it on it gave a beep and
loaded up the BIOS (basic input output system).
It was a pretty bad pc i discovered, no usbs because it is a Pentium 2,
it has a quantum fireball hard drive, an Intel Celeron processor and 65536k of
memory. I ask my friends in the ICT lab for help, they point out how useless it
is (because before i didn’t realise), but I’m still going to use it.